Nowadays, one of industry's main concerns is about effectively communicating with both internal and external audiences. Frequently, electronic presentations are used for communicating to efficiently provide information to the respective audience. Presentations may be built on various technologies, but are all meant to communicate a variety of information to a variety of auditors.
To increase the efficiency of communication, it is desired to exploit a single presentation in different ways depending on the current circumstances at the moment when the presentation is held. These circumstances include the persons forming the audience, i.e., depending on their technical background or forming part of company internals or externals, as well as available time for holding the presentation. For example, a company's strategy is communicated differently to internal employees than to business partners or to customers. Also technical background information is usually omitted when providing information for marketing purposes. Such cases refer to entire slides as well as to a partial content of slides.
Accordingly, a presentation may require updating depending on the above given considerations. This implies that certain information is shown or not shown to the audience or provided in a different way. This requires that slides of the presentation have to be rearranged or omitted, and/or the content of a slide has to be modified. One approach is modifying a presentation each time it is shown depending on the above circumstances. This requires a huge amount of manual work each time the presentation has to be shown under different circumstances.
Another approach is maintaining a set of similar presentations covering the same topic, taking into account the above considerations. Therefore, when the presentation has to be modified, the entire set of presentations has to be modified, which is time-consuming and easily leads to inconsistencies between the different presentations.
It is further known in the art, e.g. from the U.S. Pat. No. 7,512,887 B2 to assign one or more presentation constraint parameters to the slides of a presentation, so that all slides can be kept in one presentation, but are presented to the audience depending on the constraint parameter. This has still the drawback that the constraint parameter has to be set manually by a person holding the presentation and is easily forgotten to be updated. Accordingly, there is certain probability that a presentation will be shown, which is not provided for the present audience. Also dynamic modifications of the presentation are not possible.